We study a procurement setting in which the buyer seeks a low price but will not allocate the contract to a supplier who has not passed qualification screening. Qualification screening is costly for the buyer, involving product tests, site visits, and interviews. In addition to a qualified...

In this paper, the authors examine a supply base diversification problem faced by a buyer who periodically holds auctions to award short term supply contracts among a cohort of suppliers (i.e., the supply base). To mitigate significant cost shocks to procurement, the buyer can diversify her...

We consider a manufacturer who uses a reverse, or procurement, auction to determine which supplier will be awarded a contract. Each bid consists of a price and a set of nonprice attributes (e.g., quality, lead time). The manufacturer is assumed to know the parametric form of the suppliers' cost...

We study a manufacturer that faces a supplier privileged with private information about supply disruptions. We investigate how risk-management strategies of the manufacturer change and examine whether risk-management tools are more or less valuable in the presence of such asymmetric information....

We consider sealed- and open-bid total-cost procurement auctions where two attributes are used for contract award decisions: price, which is bid by the supplier, and a fixed cost adjustment, which is included by the buyer to capture nonprice factors such as logistics costs. Suppliers know only...

Motivated by the ease with which online customers can bid simultaneously in multiple auctions, we analyze a system with two competing auctioneers and three types of bidders: those dedicated to either of the two auctions and those that participate simultaneously in both auctions. Bidding behavior...

We study a buyer's strategic use of a dual-sourcing option when facing suppliers possessing private information about their disruption likelihood. We solve for the buyer's optimal procurement contract. We show that the optimal contract can be interpreted as the buyer choosing between...

Detection of community is a crucial step to understand the structure and dynamics of complex networks. Most of conventional community detection methods focus on optimizing a certain objective function or on clustering nodes based on their similarities, which leads to a phenomenon that they have...

The experiment was conducted with the traditional manual harvesting and mechanical harvesting of sugarcane, to compare the effects of different harvesting method on the sugarcane stubble quality and the growth of ratoon. The experimental results are as follows. (i) The stubble height and...

Objectives: This paper presents a literature review that explores the causal factors of smokeless tobacco use among college students in the United States. Methods- A literature search was conducted among national and international peer-reviewed literature in the following databases: Academic...